Twain's Neighbor Stood Up For Florida

Seminole's PAST

This is the last of three columns about Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings about life along the St. Johns River from her 1873 book Palmetto Leaves. Today: Winters for invalids and "sons of Nimrod."

Late in her life, Harriet Beecher Stowe lived near Mark Twain in Hartford, Conn.

Twain was enjoying the success of persuading U.S. Grant to write his memoirs and allowing Twain to publish the two volumes in the life of the general-turned president. Twain also was beginning to relax, now that his latest novel was a bestseller. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told the story of a young boy traveling with a black slave along the Mississippi River on his voyage to freedom.

The 1884 book's themes of slavery and racism in America were influenced by Twain's neighbor and her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, before the nation plunged into the war that made Grant the savior of the nation.

By this time, Stowe was no longer spending half her year in Florida, where she had written a travel book, Palmetto Leaves, on her five winters living along the St. Johns River at Mandarin.

Historian Mark Perry writes in Grant and Twain, The Story of a Friendship That Changed America that Twain respected Stowe, even if his own novel had more life and reality than Uncle Tom.

Twain, enduring his own challenges in publishing and life as a celebrity writer, also recognized that the aging writer was hounded by newspaper and public ridicule of one of her brothers, Henry Ward Beecher, a famed minister caught up in a financial and adultery scandal. Now past her prime as a writer, Stowe had her own eccentricities.

"She would knock on his door in Hartford with a gift of flowers for Livy, [Twain's wife] who would later find that Harriet had plundered them surreptitiously (dripping roots and all) from her own garden," Perry writes.

Years earlier, should Twain have visited Stowe at her 30-acre orange grove and cottage overlooking a bluff along the St. Johns River, she might have picked gifts of lilies, roses, geraniums and camellias from her own garden -- or even orange blossoms growing from a 30-feet tree just a few feet outside her window.

She was proud of the fruit trees that provided the oranges for the crates that carried her name in the late 1860s.

"The things that fill the New York market, called by courtesy `oranges' -- pithy, wilted and sour -- have not even a suggestion of what those golden balls are that weigh down the great glossy green branches of yonder tree," she writes in Palmetto Leaves, first published in the newspaper National Era.

Stowe loved her Florida winters, but she also told her readers about its mosquitoes, gnats, black flies and snakes. Still, she took offense -- and took up her pen -- to anyone who insulted Florida.

One opportunity came when her editor asked her to respond to a doctor's snide comments about Florida in a competing newspaper, after his first visit to the state.

The offending writer had visited Stowe in Florida, enjoyed the "spirits" of Southern hospitality -- even earning local support as "one of the cheeriest and sunniest of inmates" -- then lampooned Florida in stories directed at those who might be considering wintering in the state.

While never naming the doctor, Stowe quoted from his writing, words that live on in contemporary stories about early Florida: "From what I have observed, I should think Florida was nine-tenths water, and the other tenth swamp."

Even worse, the doctor writes, "Many are deceived by the milder climate here; and down they come -- to die."

The doctor goes on to condemn Florida as a haven for malaria.

"How could it be otherwise? Souse Manhattan Island two feet deep in fresh water, and wouldn't the price of quinine rise?"

Stowe is willing to accept that the doctor was "undergoing that process of disenchantment which many Northern travelers experience." But, she balks as the doctor's challenges that those who are sick do not improve in Florida's climate.

"People do die in Florida. . . . It is true that sometimes the thermometer stands at seventy at noon, and that the nights are much cooler; it is true we have sometimes severe frosts in Florida; it is true we have malaria; it is true that there are swamps in Florida. . . . We never pretended that Florida was the kingdom of heaven, or the land where they shall no more say, `I am sick.' It is quite the reverse. . . . Yet, on the other hand, there are now living in Florida many old established citizens and landowners who came here ten, twenty and thirty years ago, given over in consumption who have here for years enjoyed a happy and vigorous life. . . . Undoubtedly, the county would be much better to live in if there were no swamps and no malaria; and so, also, New England would be better to live in if there were not six months winter and three more months of cold weather there."